


Experiential Writing Assignments

by EphemeralSonder (MermaidMayonnaise)



Category: Original Work
Genre: I'm just posting this to add to the word count, Lang Summer Work 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 22:09:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20535386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/EphemeralSonder
Summary: Writing exercises.





	Experiential Writing Assignments

**Author's Note:**

> About me! Yay!

**Writing Based Activities**

Exploration 7: Word search, go out into the world and jot down words that excite you/resonate with you/intrigue you.

  * Ephemeral
  * Sonder
  * Exasperate
  * Nifty
  * Mayonnaise
  * Mulaney
  * Mutter
  * Separate
  * Toasty
  * Gratuitous
  * Azure
  * Kismet (personal favorite)
  * Ngl (an acronym, but in my daily vocabulary)

(Most of these were spoken to me at some point or another and I quickly wrote them down, so I don’t have any pictures to go along with this.)

Exploration 11: Same Difference. Gather multiples of one item and try to list out at least 15 differences between them.

(I took books from around my house.)

  1. Size (My little brother’s baby books to _Eragon.)_
  2. Shape (Rectangular/square. We have an oval, too.)
  3. Colors used on cover
  4. Color scheme (My brother’s copy of the comic book _Apocalypse Taco _had a warm scheme.)
  5. Page texture (Very strange. My family looked at me like I was crazy.)
  6. Font size (This is why I prefer reading on my Kindle.)
  7. Font color (I had a book in red font. What the heck were the publishers thinking?)
  8. Font type (I discovered that the name of each font is printed in each book.)
  9. Page width (Same books were paper thin, others not. The same book width could vary from 200 to 500 pages.)
  10. The plot (Mostly fantasy, not going to lie. Me and my family are high fantasy and sci-fi junkies, and it shows.)
  11. Condition (Our communal _Harry Potter _series is held together by tape. My ACT study guide is relatively untouched.)
  12. Author (We have a lot of the same names, however.)
  13. Origin (We have a black table piled high with library books.)
  14. Location (Under the couch, on the floor, occasionally on the bookshelf.)
  15. Quality (Thankfully I steered away from _Twilight.)_

(A picture of one of our bookshelves. This doesn’t include our digital library.)

Exploration 15: What if? No answers needed.

(It’s the “what ifs” that get me. The possibility of different outcomes are paralyzing.)

  1. When is how you look not affect how you’re judged? (From a _Daria _screenshot I saw today.)
  2. What if I was an only child? Would I be bored? Would I be better off?
  3. What if _Harry Potter _was real?
  4. What if humans could do magic? What would my power be?
  5. What if the world was flat?
  6. What if I never amount to anything, or never do something that measures up to my personal standards of success?
  7. What if the world had a purge?
  8. What if everyone if the world had an IQ of 125 or greater? Less?
  9. What if we actually find aliens when we storm Area 51?
  10. What if my favorite songs disappeared off of Youtube? (I’d die of boredom, that’s what.)
  11. What if buildings were made of popsicle sticks?
  12. What if capitalism didn’t exist?
  13. What if the people who made _The Matrix _were actually onto something?
  14. What if the gender norms were switched, but everything else remained the same?
  15. What if we could experience the fourth and fifth dimensions?
  16. What if plants were sentient? What if they already are?
  17. What if you think I’m absolutely insane as you’re reading these? I most definitely am, but still…
  18. What if Greek mythology were based on real events?
  19. What if humans reproduced using seed pods? Or maybe our hair could be like dandelions. There’s a story in here somewhere.
  20. What if our toes were fingers and our fingers were toes? That’d be so cool. And weird.

Exploration 21: Invent 20 puns. (I loved doing these. The people that I tested them on, not so much.)

  1. What do you call a dreidel that isn’t in the military? A civvie-von. (Sevivon is dreidel in Hebrew. This is the pun that I created that made my family in Israel laugh.)
  2. I made omelettes today and my family said they were eggs-cellent.
  3. If you think about it, sign language is pretty handy.
  4. If Ma’ayan is boring, wouldn’t she create my yawn? (Hardee har har.)
  5. My mother shouted from the next room that I was late for my telephone conversation with my neighbors. You could say it was a close call.
  6. I was going to jump into the freezing pool, but then after testing the water with my toes I got cold feet.
  7. I tried to criticize the color of my friend’s hearing aids, but my suggestion fell on deaf ears.
  8. My friend and I were rock climbing together, and she tripped and yelled, “Cut me some slack!”
  9. My assassin friend and I weren’t sure which of the twins was the one we were supposed to kill, so I told him not to jump the gun.
  10. I unwrapped an orange and found it appealing (a-peel-ing).
  11. My brother and I walked past some cute dogs and my brother said, “Awesome dogs!” (Aw, some dogs! This was his contribution, he wanted to help.)
  12. I was practicing my graphite lineart, but when my pencil broke I found the exercise pointless.
  13. I let a trout go when I went fishing yesterday. You could say that I let it off the hook.
  14. I said I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into a new book, and my brother told me to get the pages out of my mouth.
  15. My mother said that I was taking a long time in the public bathroom and to “Stop stalling.” (My brother’s a pun genius.)
  16. Dulled pencils are boring, there’s no point to them. (Double pun!)
  17. Two bears got divorced and couldn’t bear the separation.
  18. “Give me some slack,” said the hook to the clamp, and the clamp said, “Hang on.”
  19. “Stop slacking off,” said the teacher to the engineering student, whose crane was veering dangerously downward.
  20. The aguesiac enjoyed the meal, but found it a bit tasteless.
  21. Sodium chloride and zinc walked into a bar, and were arrested for assault (a salt) and battery.

**Investigations**

Exploration 26: Through the looking glass. Take pictures of objects through your phone while zoomed up close. The harder it is to identify them, the better.

I walked around my kitchen and photographed six objects. From first to last: wasabi seaweed, a faux-leather notebook cover, swim team records, cabinet surface, leeks, and my brother Zeev’s shirt.

My family was confused by my actions, to say the least. As I casually lifted the cover of the pot and snapped a picture of the leeks like I had done that very action every day of my life, my mother looked at me strangely and said in Hebrew, “What are you doing?” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said, struggling to zoom and avoid burning my fingers on the rim of the metal.

“No.”

“English assignment.” Like a good daughter, I shrugged and walked away. I was pretty sure that my entire family thinks that a) I am lying about the origin of my new leek photography habit, or b) the teacher has some skewed ideas of what ‘summer work’ is. Not that I’m complaining.

Except for the blurred picture of the wood, I liked this exploration because my phone camera has very good quality. Go Samsung!

I debated on the ‘deeper meaning’ of this assignment for a while, and then I read _ SSSW _ which told me to stop trying to look for symbols in everything in my life-- which, I mean, fair, because I tend to do that. Maybe the point of this exercise was to let go and just notice the results. You ask yourself _ why _ you noticed it, but you don’t try to assign some arbitrary deeper meaning to the concept. I wish I thought of that myself since it’s some valid writing advice, but _ SSSW _said that as well.

I don’t know why we as humans give meanings to things, objects, concepts, and I strangely have been thinking about that for a while. Even now, I’m asking, “Why? Why are these zoomed up pictures so important?” and I don’t have an answer. I could come up with some meaningless response, like scale and being able to see the forest for the trees, but I think that would be dishonest.

We see evidence of us assigning meaning in both schoolwork and our everyday lives. The literature classes helped with this (thanks, Great Gatsby!), but every individual has some memory of a blanket they used to carry during their toddler-hood, a day at the beach with sand in your bathing suit and the taste of lemon water ice on your tongue, a blue and white striped backpack that they brought with them to school. The examples, while incredibly specific, won’t apply fully to you, or even to me. The point is that they get the concept across: of nostalgia, of _ importance. _ And while these examples are targeted specifically at childhood (since I am in the process of applying to college and regretfully thinking of simpler times), they could also apply to adults: the pair-o-dice hanging from the viewing mirror of your car, your old stained nightshirt and late nights staring at your computer trying to solve a problem until suddenly _ you got it _, your chipped coffee mug.

Why are these things important to us? Because, objectively, they’re not. A passerby would consider these objects as trash, the memories as just one day among many.

They’re important, not because of their value, but because _ we say so. _ Because they’re important to _ us. _

And that’s so incredibly important, because these tiny pieces all jumble up and combine and make up who we are. If you remove all of these objects and experiences from the giant mess that is you, you’d unravel and break apart and, essentially, lose your identity.

So maybe the close-ups don’t have any value to a passerby idly scrolling through my camera roll. They’d just see some blurry photos, and maybe, if they were educated, they’d lean in and say incredulously, “Is that a _ leek?” _It’s possible that they don’t have any value to me. But they’re an example of what it means to assign meaning to something that the random passerby could confidently say didn’t deserve it.

Exploration 32: Walk where you might typically think to drive. What do you notice that you have or might have not noticed before?

My local pool, Maple Manor, is somewhere that I go in the summer at least once a day. I participate in the local swim team (we lost this year for the first time in almost twenty years, a tragedy), so on a typical day, I go to practice and shake my fists at the sky, suffer for an hour and a half, and then miserably bike home. After napping until noon, my family and I either return to spend our day at the pool or go to a swim meet, which is (surprise!) also located at the pool.

I’ve participated in swim team for about eight years now. It’s a good time.

The novelty of a trip to the pool has worn off for me around the 214th time I’ve had to bike there. I decided to walk back from there for this assignment. One day on the way back from the pool (I was driven there, along with my brothers), I decided to walk instead of being in the car for two minutes with my incredibly raucous family.

The walk was peaceful if a bit boring. I played music on my phone from Pandora and my favorite alternative rock station came up, so much to the chagrin of my neighbors I sang along. It was about three o’clock on a summer afternoon, so the sun shone brightly on me and I subtly wished that a car would run me over before I fried like an egg on the sidewalk. 

Some interesting things that struck my interest:

  1. Our neighbors on Terrace have a garage door that is colored blue and white in a checkerboard pattern. It doesn’t fit with their color scheme. I wonder why it’s there.
  2. There’s a dead bird on the right-hand side when walking to the pool. It looks like a blue jay, but I didn’t get close enough to identify it. After writing this, I went back every day to check on its process of decomposition; one day I found it gone, and was sad.
  3. The walk home is a lot longer than a bike ride. When biking, it takes me exactly 4:12 minutes to reach the crack in the road on Ft. Washington. (I’m not weird, I just listen to _Do You Feel It? _By Chaos Chaos when biking home and mark my progress when it ends.) Walking took me about fifteen, I stopped counting around ten.
  4. I took a different route than I usually do when I’m biking, even though there are two big hills instead of one. I drive this way, though. 

It’s a well-known fact that I’m about as observant as a brick wall. Two weeks ago I discovered that our water cooler dispersed cold water as well as hot water, and upon relaying my discovery to my mother, she laughed so hard she almost fell out of her chair. I didn’t notice the water tower two streets away until three years after we moved into our house and legitimately thought that bergamot was a type of wine until this year.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the world I’m missing when I’m busy worrying over my next test or college or my tardiness. I’m afraid that my life will pass me by. To combat this, a couple of years ago I made it a point whenever I see a sunset outside my window to go outside and stand on my driveway and just _ be. _I look at the colors, breathe in the night air, and sometimes I’m able to see the stars.

I think this assignment was built around the same concept. I think I ruined it by listening to music since I automatically went into my own little internal world, but it has to be worth something that I’m aware of this and actively try to combat it. It would be a shame to worry about trivial things while life flashes me by.

(Insert a glorious picture of myself squinting against the sun, post-chlorine hair included in all its glory, on the walk home.)

Exploration 35: Sculpted spontaneity. Create a sculpture w/ stuff around you. Take a picture.

It just so happened that my summer assignment for Honors 3D art was to create a sculpture using found objects. I procrastinated on that, naturally, so even although I acquired seashells from the shore, stubby pencils from the dark recesses of my backpack (along with a small mountain of pencil shavings) and many chicken feathers courtesy of Hannah Xiao ahead of time, I didn’t go to AC Moore to buy my infrastructure in time for this assignment, which was a shame.

As you can see in the picture, I sculpted a couch... out of couch cushions. It’s a work of genius, and took me about two minutes. In those one hundred and twenty seconds, I managed to a) get interrogated by my entire family, again, and b) yelled at by my mother for using the forbidden living room pillows. Even virtuosos must sacrifice their dignity every once in a while for the sake of true art.

(A picture of the glorious sculpture. It’s almost as tall as I am, which is a little sad.)

Which brings me to the eternal yet overused question: what _ is _ art? Does it require guidelines, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? It’s a universal experience to go to some art museum or sculpture garden, snort, and say, “Oh, _ I _could do that,” in a snooty tone. To that I say (especially to myself), “Yeah, so why didn’t you?”

Why didn’t I, indeed. There are many reasons: procrastination, lack of supplies, a feeling of inadequacy. There’s also the obvious: not having thought of the idea; or, even worse, waking up in the middle of the night with it fresh in your mind, then rolling over and going back to sleep confident that the idea will still be fresh in your mind come morning. That’s easily solvable, though-- just keep a notebook next to your bed. I do it, and while I absolutely refuse to turn on my desk light at four in the morning and jot down an idea, I do have a five to ten minute period right before I go to sleep where I scribble down various ideas that I had throughout the day.

I think Einstein was the one who said something along the lines of boredom being an important part of the thinking process. I’m not sure exactly what the quote was, but I vaguely remember him saying that letting your mind wander was a crucial part of the process. That idea has stayed with me, obviously, enough that while I don’t remember the context, the concept of it is still fresh in my mind.

I think it’s perfectly relevant in this day and age; even though the context has changed, the problems remain the same. We have more distractions now, with the new and improved technology and, obviously, cell phones. (Oh boy, I sound like a Baby Boomer.) I inherently dislike cell phones, and that’s the truth. I think they’ve become a kind of security blanket to Gen Z. When I babysit my neighbors aged around five and three (young enough for the issue to be serious), I see them reaching for their iPad with fingers that can barely hold a pencil. On one hand, exposure to technology at such a young age. On the other… the same point.

But I digress. Like this exercise, everything worth doing needs a certain amount of ideas and creativity and drive to do it. For this assignment, it’s a zero. (I’m just kidding. I enjoyed writing these.) When I stared at the room and tried to envision a sculpture and came up with nothing, I took a little break and went to stare at the koi fish in the pond outside. When I came back, presto! An idea.

Exploration 36: Altered states. Come up with a way to alter your physical experience of this world. 

An incredibly easy way for me to alter my physical experience of the world was to take off my glasses. Now, my glasses are pretty essential to my general well-being. I have a relatively high prescription, which unfortunately means that I can’t see anything, ever. Being the intelligent AP student that I am, I decided to go through a swim meet completely without glasses. 

It actually wasn’t that different from a regular meet, so this section is relatively short. I was still able to recognize people without seeing their faces, and since my other senses were still (sort of, it was summer) intact, I was able to maneuver my way around the pool without too much difficulty. What was interesting, however, was that I differentiate people by their body language and physical structure. Body language was actually a surprise for me, even if I couldn’t see details, I could generally know the identity of someone without too much trouble.

(Picture of an unhappy me pointing to my eyes to indicate the lack of glasses, and my brother next to me, mocking.)

And now I get philosophical. The lack of sight, or more accurately the hindrance of normal vision, opens many aspects of its importance for debate. Does the world exist, pardon the pun, only as we see it? Or is our perception merely what constitutes our vision as a fraction of the whole?

Each person has their own perception and interpretation of the world around them. Scientifically, the cones in our eyes are a type of photoreceptor, and are crucial to how we see color. If color, one part of this world that we can affirm as concrete, are actually subjective, what does that mean for the other parts of the world not so easily categorized and labeled? Society, other humans, interpersonal relationships… The mere actions of taking off my glasses changed my behavior towards others. You have to wonder how different aspects of people’s lives affect their own vision of the environment around them. 

It’s fascinating, really, the notion that a few minor factors can completely alter someone’s perception.

Which brings me to another point: is the only way you exist how others perceive you? It’s like in the eternal battle between books versus movies: in books you are provided with the internal monologue, only dialogue in the latter. You get to know the characters in the book very well, having walked a metaphysical mile in their shoes. Movies, conversely and somewhat ironically, are more like the real world in terms of others. You are provided with a visual and dialogue and gestures. 

It doesn’t matter whether there’s a tornado of thoughts happening inside the person’s head; all that matters is what portion of that makes it past their lips. It’s a purification, in a way: boiling down the cloud of thoughts and wonderings into concrete words. And this may get too rights-for-introverted-people, but that’s why I think this system of extroversion and general human interaction is so detrimental to the reputation of introverts such as myself. If only people could see the whirlwinds of thoughts and memories and stories constantly whirring and creating inside our heads, they might appreciate our contribution to society more. 

As it is, I think that what people put back out into the world really emphasizes what they took from it. When creating, I always imagine soaking up the world like a sponge, waiting a certain amount of time for it to mix in my head, and then vomit it all up onto a piece of paper. And while that description is certainly a visual, it’s effective.

I deviated slightly, but my analysis still stands. I guess all it took was me not being able to see… to _ see _that. Pun intended.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumbr's mermaidmayonnaise.


End file.
